1. Technical Field
The present teaching relates generally to document management. More specifically, the present teaching relates to document update in a database.
2. Discussion of Technical Background
With the advancement of information technology, more and more documents need to be stored and organized in databases. Each document in a database may have an index for improving the speed of data retrieval operations. An index of a document should be updated when there is a content update for the document. On the other hand, even in absence of a content update, the index needs to be updated to prevent a hysteresis of a data retrieval operation in the database over a period of time.
Effort has been made to update a document index at an expiry of a fixed time period, i.e., an expiry period. FIG. 1 illustrates an exemplary system 100 for updating documents based on fixed expiry periods, in accordance with a prior art. The system 100 may include one or more document databases 112, 114, 116, a document access platform 130, a document update unit 140, and a plurality of timers 150. Document databases 110 may include a plurality of documents each having an index, so that one or more documents can be accessed, via the indices 120, by the document access platform 130. The document update unit 140 may retrieve documents from 110 by the document access platform 130, and update the documents based on a document update request 160 and the timers 150. The document update request 160 may indicate that one or more documents need to be updated, e.g., due to some content changes. Each of the timers 150 may set up a fixed expiry period for a document or a group of documents to be updated when the expiry period ends.
Since documents are usually categorized into large datasets in a database, each dataset may have a large quantity of documents that have same or close expiry periods and need to be updated at a same time period. Thus, such conventional approaches, e.g., the approach implemented by the system 100 in FIG. 1, may cause a low responding speed or a breakdown of the databases 110, by updating a very large set of documents at a time. Therefore, there is a need to develop a solution for updating documents to avoid the above drawbacks.